Molly Huang in Asterisk:
It’s always been a personal fascination of mine what words a culture uses — and what words it lacks. Not only is it a good indication of how native speakers tend to think and feel; the creation of new words reflects new thoughts and new emotions that have become common enough to require a shorthand. Nowhere is this happening faster than on the internet. Every year, dozens of new slang terms spread like wildfire in people’s vocabularies. I thought I’d cover some of the terms I find most interesting that are circulating on the Chinese internet right now.
The Japanese term “shachiku” (社畜) literally means “company livestock.” It gained popularity in China almost as soon as it was invented. But lately I’ve seen many around Weibo joking that not even livestock are worked like Chinese university graduates — cattle will literally die if you make them work 996 hours (that is, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week). For a time, people likened themselves to machines instead. That was until someone found a better term in a 1984 article from the People’s Daily, the CCP’s official newspaper: “human ore.” It refers to the way workers feel they are a resource to be exploited, consumed, and discarded to fuel the engine of progress.
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It is unlikely the dark conjecture would have occurred to me were I not offspring of one, but my prejudicial lens has no bearing on whether Shakespeare died a suicide. I have scoured biographies old and new and find that nobody over four centuries has entertained the idea in print. Hardly an exception is Edward Bond’s 1973 play Bingo—the character Shakespeare, guilt-ridden for failing to thwart land enclosures near Stratford, takes sugar-coated poison tablets left behind for him by Ben Jonson. Is our myriad-minded Shakespeare, the suicide taboo silently at work, above the degradations of Dante’s seventh circle, reserved for suicides, who must keep company with usurers and sodomites? Or is there no evidence?
Not long
Prioritizing fundamental research over deployment
The thing about gay life is that you have countless mini-adventures, which years later leave only the faintest grooves on your cortex. The handsome big blond with the sweetest smile and strongest Boston accent I’d ever heard, who wanted to get fucked only and moved out to San Diego, where he caught the eye of many a sailor, got infected with AIDS, and died.
But despite its fundamental importance, entropy is perhaps the most divisive concept in physics. “Entropy has always been a problem,” Lloyd told me. The confusion stems in part from the way the term gets tossed and twisted between disciplines — it has similar but distinct meanings in everything from physics to information theory to ecology. But it’s also because truly wrapping one’s head around entropy requires taking some deeply uncomfortable philosophical leaps.
To say that the American health-care system is in less-than-great working order may strike many as a colossal understatement. Yes, it functions well on the heroic-medicine front. It possesses incomparable medical technology and pharmaceuticals, and it can boast an impressive corps of well-educated and compassionate physicians, nurses, and other health-care workers. For all those strengths, however, American health care labors under mighty challenges, including an overstretched and underfunded public-health system, the increasing concentration of hospitals and even medical practices in the hands of for-profit businesses, and a patchwork health-insurance regime that leaves too many people inadequately covered and gives too much control to insurance-company executives and too little to health-care professionals.
A primary byproduct of ore-smelting is the mixture of oxides and silicon dioxide known as slag. Heaped into giant conical mountains alongside industrial sites, these otherworldly piles are known as slag heaps. Appearing as granulated pyramids of blast furnace refuse, slag heaps can include an assortment of copper, nickel, and zinc removed as non-ferrous material during the refinement of what will become steel. For those raised in industrial regions, such as Pittsburgh, slag heaps were once a common site along rivers such as the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio. These sooty remnants of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation or the Carrie Blast Furnaces are the height of the great Indian mounds that dotted this landscape centuries ago, but rather than a verdant green, these heaps are the color of an overcast Western Pennsylvania sky. They are incongruously beautiful and have a way of getting into the lungs and blood of residents—both literally and metaphorically. As 
YOU OPEN BOX 34, take the typescript from its folder. You can see right away that the song is pretty much finished. He’s got the first four verses locked in, save one lingering question about Ma. Should she be forty but say she’s twenty-four, or eighty claiming sixty-four? Or what if she’s twenty but wants you to think she’s sixty-four? Is that better? Nah. But this is small potatoes, a distraction from the real problem, which is the fifth and final verse, which is still stumping him.
Thousands of new genes are hidden inside the “dark matter” of our genome. Previously thought to be noise left over from evolution, 
Though it’s not presented as such in her introduction or conclusion, femicide, as the ne plus ultra of patriarchal logic, is at the core of Chollet’s analysis in Reinventing Love. In a chapter entitled “Real Men,” Chollet argues that intimate partner violence should be thought of not as an aberration but rather as the most logical outcome of gender norms. She quotes feminist therapist Elisende Coladan in suggesting that, instead of calling abusive partners “narcissists,” such men should more readily be called the “healthy children of patriarchy.” Taking this logic further, Chollet spends a large chunk of this chapter analyzing with great curiosity what’s going on with the women who fall in love with known serial killers, from 
It can be argued, with some important caveats and qualifications, that Peter Schjeldahl was the most inventive, entertaining, and self-observing art critic to have ever worked in the English language. For 60 years, give or take, he struck himself like a tuning fork against works of art and attempted to transcribe the way his nerves vibrated to the aesthetic. These transcriptions involved dense, epigrammatic sentences, zany metaphors, and a chatty authority that was both deceptively approachable and disarmingly smart. Although he put himself in the bloodline of poet-critics like Baudelaire and Frank O’Hara, their prose never approaches anything like the constant, look-at-me lexical wizardry of an exhibition review by Schjeldahl. His writing credo: “Concentrated. At least one idea per sentence. Melodious, I hope. With jokes.”
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